Just like everyone else. Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901–78) Forensic investigation is concerned primarily with piecing together the disparate clues left at a scene in order to form a coherent picture of events and, crucially, to establish the identities of those involved or—equally importantly —those who were not. However, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the need for a reliable, systematized method of identifying the people involved in a crime was recognized. Prior to then, the most common ways of doing so were eyewitness accounts and information extracted by torture. Needless to say, both could easily provide a faulty account; as this was recognized, various experts rose to the challenge of improving matters. The pioneering French forensics expert Edmond Locard (1877–1966) once said that “to write a history of identification is to write the history of criminality,” and of course most forensic science is concerned either with establishing identity or with linking an individual to a crime scene.
